Friday, June 29, 2018

Venezuela: socialism impoverishes. A minimum-wage worker in Venezuela could afford 5 cups of coffee each month — and nothing else


June 28, 2018
Five million Venezuelan bolivars is the equivalent of $1.45. It's also roughly a minimum-wage worker's entire monthly salary in the South American country.
Thanks to stunning inflation, it now takes 1 million bolivars to buy a cup of coffee in a Venezuelan cafe, Bloomberg reports. That's one-fifth of Venezuela's monthly minimum wage, and a 10,000-bill stack of Venezuela's most common bank note, the 100-bolivar bill.
To illustrate Venezuela's rampant inflation, Bloomberg has tracked the price of a cup of coffee since December 2016 on its Cafe Con Leche index. One dose of caffeine cost 450 bolivars when the index launched two years ago, but 43,378 percent inflation in the last year has led to today's astronomical price.

Additionally, if the pace of inflation over the past three months continues, Bloomberg estimates that inflation would be 482,153 percent after a year. Check out the Cafe Con Leche index at Bloomberg for a detailed — and astonishing — visual. Kathryn Krawczyk

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